Announcing the 2026 ARC Award Winners
- 01 Sep 2026
- Jeremiah Sierra
Advancing Real Change, Inc. is proud to announce the recipients of our 2026 awards! The awards are selected by a volunteer committee of accomplished mitigation specialists, as well as capital and non-capital defenders, and shine a light on the dedication and compassion of leaders in the profession.
Muhammad-White Award: Amy Williams
The Muhammad-White Award honors a mitigation specialist whose body of work has profoundly advanced the field of mitigation.
Amy Williams, Founding Principal and leader of Williams Mitigation & Consulting, is known by colleagues in Texas and across the country as a devoted mitigation specialist, compassionate advocate, and creative educator. Throughout her career, she has helped teams save lives and secure humane sentences by obtaining stays of execution, convincing prosecutors to drop death, and persuading the most conservative courts to recognize Atkins and grant life without parole after death has been sentenced; all while raising the standard of care in the profession.
Amy has demonstrated an ability to discover mitigating evidence through discipline and persistence where others have failed, and she can be counted on to build trust with clients, family members, and witnesses. Her intelligence, fundamental warmth, and principled, thorough approach to mitigation have earned the respect of her colleagues, surviving family of victims, and prosecutors alike. She encourages every team member and seeks varying viewpoints, and has demonstrated a commitment to recruiting and developing new, diverse talent in the mitigation field.
As a licensed clinical social worker, she uses her training in a host of ways to inform legal representation of clients with serious mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and significant trauma. In addition to guiding her team, Amy is also a respected mentor and teacher. She provides mitigation consultation for the Texas Habeas Assistance and Training Project (TxHAT) and the NACDL, where she has taken the lead in expanding and elevating interactive trainings for mitigation specialists and nonlawyer defense team members. She serves as a mitigation mentor for the Scharlette Holdman Mitigation Mentorship Program, sponsored by the ACLU, and devotes hundreds of pro bono hours to training others in some of the most under-resourced and deadliest jurisdictions in the country.
Throughout her career, Amy has been an invaluable member of the defense community and a leader in mitigation investigation. She has truly advanced justice and humanity in her practice and in the profession.
Emerging Leader Award: Chelsea Richardson
The Emerging Leader Award is given to a mitigation specialist who represents the future of the profession.
Chelsea Richardson is the Mitigation Supervisor with the Michigan State Appellate Defender Office (SADO) Juvenile Lifer Unit, which advocates for clients who were unconstitutionally sentenced to die in prison for crimes that occurred when they were teenagers. Chelsea leads a multi-disciplinary team of mitigation specialists and works closely with attorneys, reentry specialists, and paralegals.
Chelsea has dedicated her career to raising the standard of mitigation practice in juvenile life without parole cases. Prior to joining SADO, Chelsea worked as a mitigation specialist at the Northern Virginia Capital Defender Office, a trial-level public defender office that represented clients facing the death penalty. The work of Chelsea and her colleagues in Virginia contributed to the broader movement that ultimately led to the abolition of the death penalty in the Commonwealth. She has carried that same rigor and humanity into her work on behalf of children sentenced to life without parole in Michigan, advancing the practice to a level of advocacy that reflects the depth and multidisciplinary approach traditionally in death penalty defense.
Her work has contributed to numerous outstanding outcomes for her clients, including securing term-of-years sentences for many individuals facing the reimposition of juvenile life without parole. Chelsea’s ability to develop compelling mitigation narratives has been instrumental in helping courts and prosecutors see her clients as whole people rather than the worst moments of their lives.
Not only does Chelsea demonstrate an unwavering commitment to best practices in her own cases, but she also instills those same principles in the mitigation specialists she supervises and the attorneys she works with. She provides thoughtful mentorship by emphasizing that effective mitigation requires curiosity, thoroughness, and a genuine commitment to understanding each client’s unique history and circumstances.
Chelsea has set the standard for mitigation practices in Michigan, and she is shaping the emerging field of non-capital mitigation. She approaches every case with diligence, persistence, and compassion, leaving no avenue unexplored in uncovering the experiences, trauma, strengths, and humanity of her clients.
Award for Exceptional Service: Wiggins, Childs, Pantazis, Fisher, & Goldfarb, LLC
The Award for Exceptional Service acknowledges the commitment of one of our partners in the capital and criminal defense fields. ARC staff members determine the winner of this award independently of the awards committee.
WCPFG is headquartered in the historic Kress Building, which was at the intersection of many of the seminal events that occurred during the spring of 1963, a major turning point in the Civil Rights Movement. The firm, which purchased the historic building and restored it to its previous beauty, now seeks to honor that legacy, using the building to bring people together in pursuit of justice.
As a national firm, Wiggins, Childs, Pantazis, Fisher & Goldfarb has been involved in cases across the country as plaintiff attorneys, trial lawyers, advocates, and litigators. For the past 40 years, they have pursued and won complex, groundbreaking and important lawsuits nationwide in the area of civil rights, discrimination and harassment, wage and hour, personal injury and death, victims’ rights, and business litigation.
Thanks to the generous donation of space by WCPFG, ARC was able to open a regional office in Birmingham this year. Being a member of the WCPFG community has been a milestone for ARC as we seek to deepen our work in the state and region. We are grateful to the firm for its generosity and dedication to representing those in need.
Join our free event
Join us at Together Towards Justice to celebrate our award winners!
September 24 | 1pm Eastern | Online
All are invited to our annual virtual event when we will celebrate excellence in mitigation and partners driving change in our criminal legal system.
We are honored to be joined this year by Maurice Chammah, a journalist at The Marshall Project and recent host of “The Last 12 Weeks,” a podcast with Serial Productions and The New York Times. He’s the author of the 2021 book Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, and currently writes “Redemption Songs,” a series on music made in prisons.
This event is free and open to all.